Clinton promises cease-fire on Obama, for now

A split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was inevitable. Now that they’ve made peace, keeping it will be the challenge.

The Obama and Clinton camps tried to mend their differences Tuesday, but certain dynamics won’t be as easy to overcome in the months ahead as Clinton mulls a White House bid: Some advisers around both politicians have a hard time letting bygones be bygones. The press is determined to continue to dissect the relationship. And Obama and Clinton have genuinely different interests and instincts on some big questions facing the country.

White House aides then groused anonymously to The New York Times that Clinton was far more muted on areas of disagreement when she was actually serving in Obama’s Cabinet. And hours later, longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod escalated the situation, swiping at Clinton on Twitter for her Iraq war vote years ago.

By Tuesday afternoon, Clinton had called Obama as part of a very public attempt to kill the ugly headlines.

Obama aides and some Clinton allies downplayed the 72-hour episode with dismissive complaints about a voracious media that have been looking for fissures between the two camps since the 2008 Democratic primary, and both sides made it clear they wanted to move on.

“To me, this story is a classic August self-licking ice cream cone,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide who assisted Clinton with the rollout of her recent memoir, “Hard Choices.”

But the maneuvering nonetheless demonstrated how the Obama-Clinton alliance, long viewed as mutually beneficial, will be tested repeatedly.

Obama has a record and a legacy to solidify in the public’s mind before leaving the White House. The shot by Axelrod underscored that the president’s allies aren’t going to take the criticism without some kind of fight.

Clinton, who served as secretary of state under Obama, faces the challenge of having to separate herself from an unpopular president but not so much that she looks inauthentic or opportunistic. Obama may have middling job approval numbers, but he still maintains a deep reservoir of support among constituencies that Clinton won’t want to alienate.

And while Clinton wants to shed the long-held public view of her as overly cautious and poll-tested, being candid also comes with a price. At the same time, her comments to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg underscore that Clinton has never been a natural politician, remains far more gaffe-prone than many believe and has a rail-thin political operation with no master strategist.

The relationship between Obama and Clinton is so sensitive that few Democrats wanted to touch the issue Tuesday, particularly after Axelrod’s tweet. Many White House aides and allies declined to comment or ignored requests to talk about it.

Longtime Clinton ally James Carville, normally a chatty political observer, dodged by cheerfully saying, “There’s a town in Texas called El Paso. And I’m gonna El Paso” on this one.

Others tried to downplay the episode.

Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, told CNN late Tuesday afternoon that the Obama-Clinton relationship is “very resilient.” “They have been through so much together,” Rhodes said. “They agree about far more than they disagree about.”

Vietor, meanwhile, dismissed the notion of a growing rift. “The president and Secretary Clinton are extremely close,” Vietor said in an email. “So are their staffs.”

Clinton has spent months creeping away around the margins from the president, while primarily highlighting the areas where they agree.

In “Hard Choices,” which she was promoting in the interview with Goldberg, Clinton devoted a chapter to the mess in Syria, a topic that was one of her key policy differences with Obama. Shortly before she left the State Department, she and then-CIA head David Petraeus advocated a plan to arm Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar Assad’s regime — a plan Obama nixed.

In the Goldberg interview, however, she used more pointed language than in the past, describing Obama’s decision against aiding the rebels as a “failure.” But her toughest words were about Obama’s overall approach on foreign policy, which some of the president’s advisers have described as “Don’t do stupid sh—,” or “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said.